Redefining mark-paragraph and mark-word

I can’t say that I’m completely happy with the way emacs marks some elements, namely :

mark-paragraph

The default mark-paragraph visually selects a paragraph as follows:

but I think I would rather have the cursor show at the bottom of the selected paragraph, it just feels more natural to me, so as thus:

To achieve this I wrote the following with a rebind to the default mark-paragraph keybinding or in orgs case the mark-element

(defun my/mark-paragraph ()
  "redefinition of mark-paragraph"
  (interactive)
  (forward-char)
  (backward-paragraph)
  (push-mark)
  (forward-paragraph)
  (setq mark-active t))

(global-set-key (kbd "M-H") 'my/mark-paragraph)

I had to forward-char initially to step on to the paragraph if my cursor was just before the paragraph as this felt natural to me so that the backward-paragraph won’t jump to the previous paragraph.

So just a simple function with a few tweaks here and there to make the paragraph marking feel a little more natural, probably subconsciously taking cues from my time working with many different text editors and as always with emacs it is pretty awesome that this kind of low level finely grained functionality can be modified to such and extent.

mark-word

Next up is mark-word. I’m finding myself wanting to naturally just mark the current word my cursor is within and currently I feel I’m having to work quite hard to achieve this by a combination of backward/forward-word and marking.

The default mark-word (M-@) seems to only mark to the end of a word, as thus:

I would want something more like:

So I created the following function and rebound to the default mark-word :

(defun my/mark-word ()
  "redefinition of mark-word"
  (interactive)
  (backward-to-word 1)
  (forward-to-word 1)
  (push-mark)
  (forward-word)
  (setq mark-active t))

(global-set-key (kbd "M-@") 'my/mark-word)

This was trickier than I first thought as when I manually mark a word through a combination of key-presses I actually apply a little logic in that if the cursor is on the first character I don’t backward-word as this would take me to the previous word!

I might be able to work out if the cursor is on the first character of a word?, but the function starts to become unnecessarily complicated.

To solve this I used backward-to-word which moves backward until the end of a word. This will work irrespective of where my cursor is within the current word and then forwarding back on to the current word so my cursor is on the first character. At this point I can now mark and forward-word to select the word. Yes I have used word many times here, word, word, word, word, WORD!!!! 😀

Now typing all this out I wonder if there is a simple function to just move the cursor to the start of a word, if there is I couldn’t seem to find it, but as always I have learnt a lot along the way!

[Edited : <2023-12-10 Sun>]

Actually it is possible (of course!) to work out if the cursor is on the first character of a word (see comment section), so the amended function would look like:

(defun my/mark-word ()
  "redefinition of mark-word"
  (interactive)
  (if (not (looking-at "\\<"))
    (backward-word))
  (push-mark)
  (forward-word)
  (setq mark-active t))

I feel like this is a better solution.